In his hands was the umbrella I knew so well, and I already felt at a loss and stood at attention like a schoolboy, expecting my father to start beating me, but he noticed the glance I cast at the umbrella, and that probably held him back.
‘‘Live as you like!’’ he said. ‘‘I deprive you of my blessing!’’
‘‘Saints alive!’’ my nanny muttered behind the door. ‘‘Your poor, miserable head! Oh, there’s a foreboding in my heart, a foreboding!’’
I worked on the line. It rained ceaselessly all August, it was damp and cold; the grain wasn’t taken in from the fields, and on large estates, where they harvested with machines, the wheat lay not in sheaves but in heaps, and I remember how those sad heaps grew darker every day, and the grain sprouted in them. It was hard to work; the downpour ruined everything we managed to get done. We weren’t allowed to live and sleep in the station buildings, and took shelter in dirty, damp dugouts where the ‘‘railboys’’ lived in summer, and I couldn’t sleep at night from the cold and from the woodlice that crawled over my face and hands. And when we worked near the bridges, bands of ‘‘railboys’’ came in the evenings just to beat us painters—for them it was a kind of sport. They beat us, stole our brushes, and to taunt us and provoke us to fight, they ruined our work, for instance, by smearing green paint all over the booths. To crown all our troubles, Radish began to pay very irregularly. All the painting work at the site had been given to a contractor, who had subcontracted it to someone else, who in turn had subcontracted it to Radish, having negotiated twenty percent for himself. The work itself was unprofitable, and there was rain besides; time was lost for nothing, we didn’t work, but Radish was obliged to pay the boys by the day. The hungry painters almost beat him up, called him a crook, a blood-sucker, a Christ-selling Judas, and he, poor man, sighed, raised his hands to heaven in despair, and kept going to Mrs. Cheprakov for money.
VII
A RAINY, DIRTY, dark autumn came. Joblessness came, and I would sit at home for three days in a row with nothing to do, or perform various nonpainting jobs, for instance, carting earth for subflooring, getting twenty kopecks a day for it. Dr. Blagovo left for Petersburg. My sister stopped coming to see me. Radish lay at home sick, expecting to die any day.
My mood, too, was autumnal. Maybe because, having become a worker, I now saw our town life only from its underside, making discoveries almost every day that simply drove me to despair. Those of my fellow townsmen of whom I had previously had no opinion, or who from the outside had seemed quite decent, now turned out to be low people, cruel, capable of every nastiness. We simple people were deceived, cheated, made to wait whole hours in cold entries or kitchens; we were insulted and treated extremely rudely. In the autumn I hung wallpaper in the reading room and two other rooms of our club; I was paid seven kopecks a roll but was told to sign for twelve, and when I refused to do so, a decent-looking gentleman in gold-rimmed spectacles, who must have been one of the club elders, said to me:
‘‘If you say any more about it, you blackguard, I’ll push your face in.’’
And when the footman whispered to him that I was the son of the architect Poloznev, he became embarrassed, turned red, but recovered at once and said:
‘‘Ah, devil take him!’’
In the shops, we workers were fobbed off with rotten meat, lumpy flour, and once-brewed tea; the police shoved us in church, the orderlies and nurses robbed us in hospitals, and if we, poor as we were, did not give them bribes, they fed us from dirty dishes in revenge; at the post office, the least clerk considered it his right to treat us like animals and shout rudely and insolently: ‘‘Wait! No shoving ahead!’’ The yard dogs—even they were unfriendly to us and attacked us with some special viciousness. But the main thing that struck me in my new condition was the total lack of fairness, precisely what is defined among the people by the words: ‘‘They have forgotten God.’’ Rarely did a day pass without cheating. The shopkeepers who sold us oil cheated; so did the contractors, and the workmen, and the clients themselves. It goes without saying that there could be no talk of any rights for us, and each time, we had to beg for the money we had earned as if it was alms, standing at the back door with our hats off.
I was hanging wallpaper in the club, in one of the rooms adjacent to the reading room; in the evening, as I was about to leave, the daughter of the engineer Dolzhikov came into the room with a stack of books in her hands.
I bowed to her.
‘‘Ah, hello!’’ she said, recognizing me at once and offering her hand. ‘‘I’m very glad to see you.’’
She was smiling and, with curiosity and perplexity, examined my smock, the bucket of paste, the wallpaper spread out on the floor. I was embarrassed, and she also felt awkward.
‘‘Excuse me for looking at you like this,’’ she said. ‘‘They’ve told me a lot about you. Especially Dr. Blagovo— he’s simply in love with you. And I’ve become acquainted with your sister; a dear, sympathetic girl, but I haven’t been able to convince her that there’s nothing terrible in your simplification. On the contrary, you’re now the most interesting person in town.’’
She glanced again at the bucket of paste, at the wallpaper, and went on:
‘‘I asked Dr. Blagovo to make me better acquainted with you, but he obviously forgot or had no time. Be that as it may, we’re acquainted anyway, and if you were so good as simply to call on me one day, I’d be very much obliged to you. I do so want to talk! I’m a simple person,’’ she said, giving me her hand, ‘‘and I hope you won’t feel any constraint with me. Father’s not there, he’s in Petersburg.’’
She went to the reading room, rustling her skirts, and I, when I got home, was unable to fall asleep for a long time.
During this cheerless autumn, some kindly soul, evidently wishing to alleviate my existence a little, occasionally sent me now some tea and lemons, now some pastry, now a roast hazel grouse. Karpovna said it was brought each time by a soldier, but from whom she didn’t know; and the soldier asked whether I was in good health, whether I had dinner every day, and whether I had warm clothes. When the frosts struck, I received in the same way—in my absence, through a soldier—a soft knitted scarf that gave off a delicate, barely perceptible odor of perfume, and I guessed who my good fairy was. The scarf smelled of lily of the valley, Anyuta Blagovo’s favorite scent.
Towards winter we got more work, and things became more cheerful. Radish revived again, and we worked together in the cemetery church, where we primed the iconostasis10 for gilding. This was clean, peaceful work and, as our boys used to say, gainful. We could do a lot in one day, and the time passed quickly, imperceptibly. There was no cursing, or laughter, or loud talk. The place itself imposed silence and good order and was conducive to quiet, serious thoughts. Immersed in our work, we stood or sat motionless, like statues; there was a dead silence, as befitted a cemetery, so that if a tool was dropped or the flame sizzled in an icon lamp, these noises resounded sharply and hollowly—and we turned to look. After long silence, a humming would be heard, like the buzz of bees: this was a funeral service for an infant, being sung unhurriedly, softly, in a side chapel; or the artist painting a dove on the cupola with stars around it would start whistling quietly, then catch himself and fall silent at once; or Radish, answering his own thoughts, would say with a sigh: ‘‘Everything’s possible! Everything’s
